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Seems like Vi(m) is the popular choice. Any suggestions on what is friendly for a beginner?

My suggestion is to use vi, no matter what. It is true, the first few weeks will be hard. But stay with it, grit your teeth and learn all these nifty movement commands and all the neat tricks and - after a few weeks - you will finally come to the point where you wonder why vi isn't everywhere. vi may be "love at third sight", but once you get the hang of it you will appreciate its raw power.

To me (once i was a professional musician before becoming a failed existence in IT) it was like learning an instrument: the first few weeks are awful, there are muscles hurting you didn't even know to exist and you think it is impossible to ever get something out of that damn thing, but, after much practice, you finally ascend a podium and rock the audience! This was worth the effort. I'd never trade the power of vi for any other editor whatsoever.

vi is difficult to avoid sometimes. You may never love it the way people who learned on it did; it's very much not a 21st-century program, designed for printing terminals and a keyboard which no longer exists. But it's very useful to know the basics, because there's a vim or a vi everywhere.

vi-hater's cheat sheet for vi:

i: Stop beeping at me and enter writing mode you stupid program

esc-:-w-q-enter: Save and quit

esc-:-q-!-enter: Quit without saving

esc-d-d: Delete a line because backspace isn't good enough for you

esc-esc-esc: what in the world are you doing now, quit it, stop doing that

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vi is difficult to avoid sometimes. You may never love it the way people who learned on it did; it's very much not a 21st-century program, designed for printing terminals and a keyboard which no longer exists. But it's very useful to know the basics, because there's a vim or a vi everywhere.

vi-hater's cheat sheet for vi:

i: Stop beeping at me and enter writing mode you stupid program

esc-:-w-q-enter: Save and quit

esc-:-q-!-enter: Quit without saving

esc-d-d: Delete a line because backspace isn't good enough for you

esc-esc-esc: what in the world are you doing now, quit it, stop doing that

Haha, yes ... The only time I use vi is when installing NetBSD occasionaly on some of my old hardware for kicks. But it is ubiquitous... its hard to find a Nix install without some version of it. Also that keyboard has Ctrl in the right place... non the abominable caps lock key.

nano or pico are the go to console editors for me... and I have strangely fond memories of edit in a DOS prompt, which I suppose is part of why I like the minimum profit editor... http://triptico.com/img/mp-5-curses.png

I've been using the atom editor (quite bloaty honestly)... but it integrates pretty decently with a dozen plus microcontroller toolchains as well as libraries for tons of things like the little LoRa boards I have been experimenting with.